He was just about to get back to work when Eric, who was sitting next to him, gathered up his papers and marched down the aisle to Abby Hollis. He’d finished already! Abby looked as surprised as Chris and began a murmured conversation with Eric.
Chris heard a whisper from behind. He stiffened.
‘Chris.’
It was Duncan, who was sitting right behind him.
‘Chris. Nod if you can hear me.’
Chris’s eyes darted to Abby, whose head was bent next to Eric’s.
He nodded.
‘Let me see your paper.’
Chris remained motionless.
‘Push it to one side.’
Chris didn’t move.
‘Oh, come on Chris. I need the help. Please.’
Chris felt a rush of anger. He was going to pass this exam now. He knew it. And he had worked hard to pass it. Why should he let Duncan have a look at his paper? Duncan knew that Denny and Roger had been kicked out for doing just that. If Duncan was in a mess, it was entirely his own fault.
‘Come on Chris. Let’s see the first page.’
Slowly and deliberately, Chris picked up his pen and hunched over his paper. Duncan could fend for himself. He had an exam to finish.
‘Chris! You bastard!’
This time Duncan’s whispering was too loud. Abby heard, and snapped her head towards Duncan. Chris dropped his eyes to his own paper.
‘Fucker,’ hissed Duncan a few seconds later, when Abby had turned her attention back to Eric.
George Calhoun was waiting for them as they trooped out of the exam, shattered. He told all the US-hired trainees to take a quick blood and urine test for their medical insurance. Chris, Duncan and Ian were too tired to notice. They just wanted to get out of the building as quickly as possible.
‘Coming to Jerry’s?’ said Ian to Chris.
‘Yes, definitely.’ Chris turned to Duncan. ‘You want to come?’
Duncan was pale and near tears. He ignored Chris and headed for the elevator.
Ian raised his eyebrows. ‘What was that about?’
Chris sighed wearily. ‘Forget it. Let’s get a beer.’
It was early, and Jerry’s was almost empty. But sitting there, guarding a table and a pitcher of beer, was Eric.
‘How come you left early?’ asked Chris.
‘I’d finished. I couldn’t stand it in there any more. So I came down here and got an early beer.’
‘That’s sickening.’
‘Never mind,’ said Ian. ‘Just pour me one.’ He loosened his tie and downed his beer in one. Eric poured him another one.
‘So how did you do?’ asked Chris.
Eric smiled. ‘Let’s not ask those questions. It’s finished. It’s all over. Let’s just get drunk.’
So they did.
The end of the programme was an anticlimax. There were four days of agony while they waited for the Capital Markets papers to be marked and the Americans to be given their job assignments. Chris was amazed that Waldern could mark so many lengthy papers so quickly: Ian’s theory was that he got his graduate students to do it.
After his initial anger at Chris, Duncan forgave him. He knew he had messed up; he admitted that it was his own fault that he hadn’t been properly prepared. But the guilt still weighed on Chris. It wasn’t that he felt he should have helped Duncan; Duncan had no right to expect Chris to cheat for him, and he knew it. What troubled Chris was his motivation for ignoring Duncan in the exam. The Bloomfield Weiss philosophy of look after yourself and leave your colleagues to sort out their own problems had finally got through to him. He had wanted to do nothing to jeopardize his own chances of passing; in his darkest moments, he thought that he had wanted Duncan to fail. This bothered him. Bloomfield Weiss was changing him, and having seen dozens of successful Bloomfield Weiss investment bankers, he wasn’t sure he liked that.
Alex was unusually subdued. He wandered around with a grim expression on his face and hardly spoke to any of the others. They assumed that he knew he had done badly, but didn’t want to talk about it, and so they left him alone.
The exam results were added to the results of all the other tests during the programme to make a grand total. This was pinned up on the wall outside the classroom at ten o’clock on the Thursday morning of the last week. The trainees crowded round Abby Hollis to look. Eric had made first place, Rudy Moss second, and Latasha James third. Lenka was fourth. To his great satisfaction, Chris squeezed into the first quartile at fourteenth. Ian was thirty-second and Alex just scraped above the cut-off at forty-second. Duncan had failed resoundingly at fifty-seventh. Only one person was below him, Faisal, who didn’t care.
An hour later, there was another list to look at: job assignments for the American trainees. Eric had been given the job he had asked for in Mergers and Acquisitions. Although in theory Alex was safe, he had no job assigned to him. He seemed to take this badly; the strain of the programme and his mother’s illness appeared finally to be getting to him. Rudy Moss got the assignment he wanted in the Asset Management Division, but, despite her high place in the programme, Latasha ended up in Municipal Finance. The trainees from the foreign offices would have to wait until they returned home to discover what jobs they had been given, or in cases like Duncan’s and Carla’s, for official confirmation that they had been given none.
The rest of the day was taken up with meetings, form filling, and further presentations by insignificant departments. The gossip and chatter was incessant. Most people were happy to scrape through. Those that had failed had different responses. Some took it stoically, some tried to joke about it, some, like Duncan, looked angry, and some, like Carla, just wept quietly. No one knew what to say to these unfortunates. The likes of Rudy Moss ignored them. They were history at Bloomfield Weiss, they were failures, they had zero networking value. Why waste time on them?
The fragile sense of community that had formed among the sixty young bankers over the previous five months was falling apart, as each looked forward to new lives either inside or outside Bloomfield Weiss. There was no farewell party, only snatched conversations as people made arrangements, the Americans to find out about their new jobs, and the foreigners to make their way home.
Eric and Alex had originally planned another party of their own for all the trainees. But, as the end approached and the programme disintegrated around them, they changed their minds. They decided to invite the three Brits and Lenka to join them on Eric’s father’s boat, which was moored on the North Shore of Long Island. Everyone thought this a great idea, even Duncan. So, after the last class of the programme, they all took the commuter train out to Oyster Bay, full of excitement for the evening ahead, an evening that would change their lives for ever.
7
The boat cut slowly through the sheltered waters of the bay, expertly guided by Eric. It was a sleek white sports fishing craft, about thirty feet long, with a cockpit aft, a raised bridge and a foredeck. Eric steered towards the sun, slowly sinking behind the wooded ridge of Mill Neck. The evening was lovely, the freshest for weeks. There had been a storm the night before that had cleared the muck and humidity out of the air, leaving a clear sky with little puffs of cloud and a gentle breeze. The end of the sweltering summer was near; September was only a week away.
The tensions of the training programme were gone, as everyone tucked into the alcoholic supplies they had brought with them. There were coolers of beer, and Lenka and Alex had managed to bring the ingredients for margaritas. Everyone had changed into jeans and T-shirts, and left their suits down below. Even Duncan was relaxed, and while he and Lenka didn’t talk to each other, they didn’t actually scowl at each other, either.